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Nostalgia for the late 1970s and 1980s is massively pervasive in pop culture right now, with TV shows like Stranger Things and big screen remakes and re-imaginings of period icons like Star Wars and It proving to be massively popular with audiences across the world. The new film Ready Player One may prove to be the pinnacle of the nostalgia festival; it’s a science fiction action adventure film based on an enormously popular novel by Ernest Cline, directed by the cinematic king of the 1980s, Steven Spielberg. The film is set 50 years into the future, in the aftermath of some sort of economic collapse which has left American society in disarray. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is a teenage kid living in The Stacks – a futuristic trailer park from hell – who escapes from his bleak daily life by retreating to The Oasis, a virtual reality alternative universe, along with literally billions of other people all over the world. The Oasis was created years before by James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a Steve Jobs-esque wunderkind, and after he died he left instructions for a ‘quest’ in his will: somewhere hidden deep inside the Oasis are three magical keys – Easter Eggs – and the first person to find all three will inherit control of the Oasis universe, as well as Halliday’s trillion dollar fortune. As his Oasis alter-ego avatar Parzival, Wade has spent years searching for the first of the Easter Eggs, with little success; however, shortly after teaming up with another avatar named Artemis (Olivia Cooke), Wade/Parzival locates the first key – an event which brings him to the attention of Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the unscrupulous executive of IOI, a rival tech company which wants to control and exploit the Oasis for their own gain. Read more…